Delivery driver who hit cyclist and blamed low sun found not guilty of causing death by careless driving

What ever happened to 'driving to the conditions'? 
 

I know many will think this usually means rain, snow, fog etc but for some reason think a beautiful bright sunny morning won't  also bring with it other issues. I used to regularly have to drive into the North Yorkshire Moors early in the morning. If it was clear you could guarantee, as you headed east up the hills, you would have the low sun directly in your eye line. You had to drive accordingly. I would have thought a professional driver would be used to these conditions and be able to recognise when it's going to be a problem. It's not a rare phenomena even on the east coast of Scotland 

It does seem that we are punishing the outcome rather than the behaviour.

Consider someone driving on a country road and driving far too fast round a bend when they can't possibly know the road is clear. They do this 99 times without incident but then one day a cyclist is there and the cyclist is killed. Is it just this 1% of driving which is dangerous? (careless, inconsiderate or, as here, neither)

Now suppose the cyclist is seriously injured rather than killed. Does this make the driving any better or affect the culpability in any way.

Suppose the cyclist manages to get out of the way and reports it to the police with evidence. Is the driving then perfectly acceptable?

Bungle_52 wrote:

It does seem that we are punishing the outcome rather than the behaviour.

quite true, this is the argument in favour of people like cycling Mikey. Only by acting against unsafe practices can we make roads safer. Chances are the vast majority who cause a serious accident will not want to repeat that regardless of draconian sentances. Others will not see the court cases and consider that it applies to them, after all people are not thinking "I'll drive like a knob as long as it only results in a death of someone else and not a prison sentance". They simply do not consider that they will cause a collision, because 999/1000 times someone uses a phone, no crash occurs.

It's driver centric bullshit. A jury does not understand risk mitigation as you have described it. They all probably think there but for the grace of god..... The death should be avoidable. The driver and road conditions cannot both be blameless so either road shuts or driver is at fault.

In a slightly different context, this is why we have 'near miss' reporting at work for H&S.  It is so we can pick up behaviour that is 'potentially' dangerous and correct it before the potential becomes reality.

As others have said, the jury are almost certainly "drivers" not "cyclists" and they can see themselves in the guy in front of them. "I sometime struggle to see when the sun is low". "I too sometimes don't see cyclists easily".

If they find this guy guilty they would have to reflect on the fact their own driving standards are poor and they are relying on luck not to be setting where the defendant is. 

Very sadly true.

There does need to be some clarity on this, imagine just for a minute if the jury were all cyclists, I'm quite sure this would lead to grounds for an appeal on any conviction.

Well this is the problem isn't it. There are certain cases where you need the jury to have no biases and yet in some cases they have massive bias in one direction. A jury of cyclists would be biased in the other direction no doubt. 

Being only a driver in essentially a "driver vs cyclist" case should be considered a bias but it won't be. I would wager that if you spoke to a group of people about cyclists you would find that a large proportion of them are very biased against cyclists and hold a lot of negative views on them. If you then asked those people if they were biased in any way and shouldn't be on a jury for a driver vs cycling related case they would almost certainly say no. 

Sadly the "man on the Clapham omnibus" no longer exists, there are no more omnibuses for one. As a legal construct of a 'reasonable' person, he's sadly now the "man in an Audi swearing in traffic on the Wandsworth road"

ROOTminus1 wrote:

Sadly the "man on the Clapham omnibus" no longer exists, there are no more omnibuses for one.

"Bus" is simply an abbreviation of omnibus, a vehicle for carrying large numbers of passengers, so there are still plenty of them, in London at least. It's often assumed that "omnibus" refers to the horse-drawn variety, but those were in fact horse-drawn omnibuses and the ones we have now are motor omnibuses.

mctrials23 wrote:

As others have said, the jury are almost certainly "drivers" not "cyclists" and they can see themselves in the guy in front of them. "I sometime struggle to see when the sun is low". "I too sometimes don't see cyclists easily".

If they find this guy guilty they would have to reflect on the fact their own driving standards are poor and they are relying on luck not to be setting where the defendant is. 

Indeed, so instead they conclude that potentially lethal driving is OK, and that use of the roads should carry some risk.

pockstone wrote:

Why do courts fall for this utter bullshit time and time again?

This was a jury trial - it's the education and attitude of the public that's the problem.  

Worse , there was a cyclist killed somewhere in England one Autumn where the defence ( successful) was that the cyclist’s yellow jacket blended in to the yellow Autumn leaves of roadside trees . We’ll have to have multi coloured bright jackets next but not so bright nor so multi coloured as to confuse poor motorists .

So are you saying that I should not wear my bright orange winter jacket in winter then?